InSolutionNortheastern University Research Blog2014-06-26T12:00:50Zhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/feed/atom/WordPressAngela Herringhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?page_id=13http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?p=47642014-06-25T23:59:00Z2014-06-26T12:00:50ZOur latest installment in the Antarctic co-op series from student Eileen Sheehan is a video of her and her Northeastern classmate Urjeet Khanwalkar feeding the red-blooded rock-cod N. coriiceps at Palmer Station. Here’s what she had to say about the process:

Here Urjeet Khanwalkar and I attempt to demonstrate in our aquarium room on May Day how N. coriiceps will counter-rotate with one another when feeding. By holding the fish filets, we can simulate being another fish holding on to prey. While I let go too quickly, and managed to pull the fish a bit out of the water, Urjeet did a great job at showing us how the fish manages to turn its body in the water while latching on to the food. In the background you can hear our videographer, Yinan Hu from UMass Amherst, make a couple comments about the movements of the fish.

N. coriiceps will “fight” for the food by pulling at the pieces, in our case a fish filet, and turning their bodies in opposite directions. While the main goal is to ensure that either individual wins the prey, they actually end up helping one another. In the end, both will probably get a piece of flesh because they end up ripping it in half with their motion.

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0Angela Herringhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?page_id=13http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?p=47492014-06-24T12:40:57Z2014-06-24T12:00:04ZLast week I had perhaps the best interview of my time here at Northeastern (it’s a toss up between this and the time I walked out with a bottle of homemade wine). It happened from the comfort of my office, but the person on the other end of the line was 1,500 miles south and 63 feet down: Liz Bentley Magee is the dive instructor at Northeastern’s Marine Science Centerand, as of this month, an aquanaut with Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31. She took some time out of her busy underwater schedule to tell me all about what the team has been up to.

If you have other questions for Liz, leave them in the comments. I’m sure she’ll be happy to answer. I already have another one that I can’t believe I didn’t ask: Why do aquanauts burn calories twice as fast as us terrestrialites?

Cover image courtesy of Mission 31.
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0Angela Herringhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?page_id=13http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?p=46762014-06-21T13:59:18Z2014-06-21T13:57:31ZOkay, can a girl please get a little forgiveness for not being so weekly in her weekly webcrawl lately? I promise to try to be better…

In the meantime, here’s your not-so-weekly scoop on some of the science things happening in the interwebs. Since I’ve been slacking, you get some extra links this time:

First off, the Flickr-crawl photo of the week, brought to you by Zeiss Microscopy:

Anthrax bacteria (green) being swallowed by an immune system cellMultiple anthrax bacteria (green) are being enveloped by an immune system cell (purple). Anthrax bacteria live in soil and form dormant spores that can survive for decades. When animals eat or inhale these spores, the bacteria activate and rapidly increase in number. Today, a highly effective and widely used vaccine has made the disease uncommon in domesticated animals and rare in humans. Image courtesy of Camenzind G. Robinson, Sarah Guilman and Arthur Friedlander, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Part of the exhibit Life:Magnified by ASCB and NIGMS. www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/life-magnified/Pages/default….

In the majority of his research, Northeastern associate professor of electrical and computer engineeringHossein Mosallaei tries to develop new materials that aren’t available in nature. But in some recent work with colleagues at Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Mosallaei is looking to nature herself for the inspiration.

The materials Mosallaei typically works with are called “metamaterials,” which are basically carefully arranged stacks of different materials. Think of a polymer sheet aligned with tiny squares of gold or copper and then a series of those sheets all stacked on top of each other. The resulting cube is a new material, one with very different properties than the gold or the polymer alone.

What those properties are depends on how the various components are arranged. Mosallaei’s team does extensive computational work to design specifically arranged metamaterials, which the researchers hope will open doors to entirely new fields: optical computing, for instance. Or nanoantennae that work similarly to the rabbit ears on your grandparents’ television but fit on a tiny corner of your fingernail.

The chlorosome is a critical element in the photosynthetic system of green sulfur bacteria. Image courtesy of Hossein Mosallaei.

Turns out there’s already a structure just like that in nature. It’s called a chlorosome, and it’s critical to the energy harvesting process of a photosynthetic bacteria species called Chlorobium tepidum. Also called green sulfur bacteria, these guys are thought to be one of the first photosynthetic organisms ever to have evolved since they can produce energy without needing oxygen. They do it with their chlorosomes.

This tiny structure looks a lot like a naturally-occurring metamaterial. It’s only a couple hundred nanometers across (that’s about 1,000 times thinner than a strand of hair), but it consists of tens of thousands of light-absorbing molecules called bacteriochlorphylls all bundled together in a cylinder. These molecules, Mosallaei told me, act like tiny charged wires. One side is positively charged, the other negatively charged. Together they do the heavy lifting of capturing units of energy and moving them from the chlorosome to the other parts of the bacteria’s photosynthetic machinery. “That’s the whole point of a nanoantenna,” Mosallaei said. “It receives and transmits energy.”

In ongoing work, Mosallaei and his colleagues are examining how chlorosomes work. They want to understand how chlorosomes capture light and how they transmit it to neighboring structures. In a paper released earlier this year, the team showed that it’s not an ordered process at all. Here’s the thing: there isn’t just one kind of bacteriochlorophyll. There are several types and they can be arranged, it seems, in a variety of configurations within the chlorosome.

“The things we see are random, not ordered,” Mosallaei said. “But antenna are always ordered. We have to arrange them so precisely so they can omit coherently.” Not so in this naturally-occurring structure.

This may be because there are just so very many molecules in the mix. If efficiency of the whole unit isn’t terribly high, that doesn’t mean it won’t do a good job at photosynthesis.

Mosallaei hopes the work will allow people in his field to create synthetic nanoantenna based on these natural ones and that work even better than what we’ve got so far. That’s not going to be easy, and they’re still in the early stages. But a tiny bacterium is—at least to my mind—a cool place to go for inspiration on an engineering project!

]]>0Angela Herringhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?page_id=13http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?p=46782014-06-10T21:50:40Z2014-06-11T12:00:09ZLast week, Chobani Yogurt came out with a new ad campaign intended to promote its “all-natural” ingredients list. A series of witty messages revealed themselves each time a hungry yogurt eater popped the lid on one of their Chobani100 yogurt cups.

Example: “Nature got us to 100 calories, not scientists. #howmatters.”

Not surprisingly, scientists took issue with this portrayal. They successfully hijacked the hashtag and came out with an awesome Twitter campaign of their own, promoting the prettier, not-so-scary side of science:

There are lots of things in nature…actually all of the things…that are made out of chemicals but aren’t bad for you. Take spices. Here are a few scary chemical formulas and their prettier, less intimidating versions:

Capsaicin:

AKA, cayenne pepper:

Crocin:

AKA, saffron:

and curcumin:

AKA, a chemical contained in turmeric…

…and a powerful anti-cancer agent.

And this, folks, is where our story really begins. As early as the 7th century, A.D., traditional Chinese and Indian medicine was using turmeric (and by default, curcumin) as a treatment for various conditions including everything from the common cold to parasitic worms. Later, lab studies have confirmed that curcumin kills cancer cells grown outside the body. A few animal studies have shown similar results, but in those cases there’s been a bit of a problem: curcumin is acidic, meaning it spits out hydrogen atoms when it goes into solution. The internal environment of our bodies, on the other hand, is neutral, and that disconnect makes it very difficult to a) get the compound into the body in the first place, and b) once it’s in there, get it to where it needs to go: namely, the cancer cells.

New research from the lab run by professor Tom Webster, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern, provides a handy solution to the curcumin conundrum: a nanoparticle delivery system that “opens like a flower” under acidic conditions, and then closes back up again under basic conditions.

The particle was developed by graduate student Run “Kanny” Chang, MS’14, and brings with it a couple of convenient advantages. First off, it’s able to encapsulate drug compounds like curcumin in such a way that makes them more compatible with the internal environment of our bodies (as described above). But, additionally, the surface of the particle can be decorated with all sorts of special targeting moieties that make it seek and destroy cancer cells specifically, bypassing healthy cells. Once a particle gloms onto a cancer cell, the cell engulfs it and welcomes it into its interior death chamber.

This is normal behavior: healthy cells do the same thing, it’s a process called “endocytosis” and it’s meant to take bad stuff out of the cellular environment and break it down into less toxic, biodegradable components. How does endocytosis go about doing that conversion? Easy, it creates a little pocket called a lysosome, inside of which is a highly acidic vestibule. And what happens to Chang’s nanoparticles in acidic environments? They open up like little flowers!

“Since the nanoparticles can encapsulate curcumin in their inner hydrophobic cores, they could deliver curcumin intracellularly and release drug in endosomes and lysosomes,” Chang said. “Therefore, compared to the free curcumin molecules, the anti-cancer ability of curcumin could be increased dramatically.”

In other words, when the cancer cell engulfs one of these nanoparticles and creates a lysosome around it, it’s simultaneously unleashing the very thing that will spell its demise!

A few years ago I caught a snippet of an interview with actress Helena Bonham Carter talking about aging. I will never forget the way she described her face transitioning from that of a round china doll to one with the angles and shadows of a wise older woman. I loved hearing a celebrity talk like this—she wasn’t ashamed of getting older like so much of mainstream media makes us think we should be. Instead, she was proud of it.

A lot of research has examined the way portrayals of older adults impact both the elderly community’s view of itself as well as the way younger adults view that population. Studies have shown that watching positive portrayals of older adults actually correlates with improved memory and reduced cardiovascular stress, not to mention a positive self-view, among older people watching such ads.

The idea is that older adults see these positive images of people in their own position and internalize that “stereotype” as being about themselves. As such, the same thing happens with negative images, only in the reverse direction. This is why so many public health campaigns are trying to steer clear of negative portrayals and ramp up positive ones.

But a new study from researchers in Hong Kong, in collaboration with Northeastern associate professor of psychology Derek Isaacowitz—himself an expert on happiness and aging—suggests a need for an ounce of caution in these kinds of depictions. Positive is good, the study suggests, but too positive can have a negative backlash.

The researchers showed that extremely positive (to the point of being unrealistic) portrayals of older adults can actually reduce memory performance, increase cardiovascular stress, and have a bad impact on self-image.

So commercials like this one, which aired at the Super Bowl in 2013, may not be all that great for campaigns attempting to promote positive outcomes among the older community:

More realistic ones like this are expected to be much more successful:

But it’s “a tricky balance,” said Isaacowitz. “It is important to have media portrayals that show both the positive as well as the negative aspects of aging. This is also helpful to younger adults to give them a better understanding of aging. On the other hand, this study suggests that unrealistically positive portrayals may have negative impacts on older adults themselves.”

Isaacowitz also cautioned that there could be some differences between older adults in various cultural settings. This study examined the Hong Kong Chinese population: “it is not clear how much of it would also translate to the U.S., but the message is suggestive,” he said.

A guest post from our Antarctic co-op student Eileen Sheehan referred to fur seals lounging in the sun. When I saw this post of a group of elephant seals doing the same thing, I couldn’t help but swoon. Photo by Daniela Rupolo via Flickr.

I’ve been having some crazy dreams lately, which I hear is a symptom of being knocked up. Here’s a review of a book called Dreamland all about how and why we dream. Plus some new research suggests that when we’re dropping into dreamland, it’s usually the left side of our waking world that disappears first.

How many of us have dreamed of the day when we would be able to teleport ourselves, or even just a candy bar, from one place to another? Well, a first step in making that dream a reality came to fruition this week. It’s small potatoes compared to what Willy Wonka was doing, but we’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Today’s guest post comes to you from the capable hands of blossoming science writer Gwen Schanker, AMD’18. Schanker just completed her first year at Northeastern, where she studies journalism and biology. She is a regular contributor to The Huntington News and the NU Science Magazine, as well as several other publications around the web. You can find more of her writing at her own blog, Confessions of an Aspiring Science Journalist.

Axolotl salamanders’ ability to regrow their limbs has been on scientists’ radar since 2006, and research on this phenomenon and the developments it could lead to in regenerative biology hasn’t slowed down since. Not too long ago, Wired Magazine named the Mexican axolotl its “Absurd Creature of the Week.” The hope is that with enough research, biologists will learn the unique conditions under which the salamanders’ limbs regenerate after being amputated.

Studying these creatures requires the dedication of teams from all over, including a group of Northeastern students—both undergraduate and graduate—who work with biology professor James Monaghan to examine the genomes of axolotl salamanders and to determine the factors required for regeneration.

It’s no secret that Northeastern is abuzz with scientific inquiry, and the researchers struggling for answers aren’t hard to find either. When I found out that Dan Humphrey, S’18, a second-year biochemistry major with whom I walk back and forth from tutoring math at the Yawkey Boys and Girls Club on Tuesday afternoons, who is also part of the on-campus a cappella group Distilled Harmony, was a recently integrated member of Monaghan’s research team, I saw an opportunity to hone my skills as a science writer.

And so, in an interview at Monaghan’s lab in mid-April, I met up with Humphrey to discuss what the researchers are doing and why it’s important. Through a Q-and-A followed by countless clarification questions, which Humphrey answered with the help of some of his colleagues, I gradually began to understand the details of the lab and the work the students do on a daily basis.

The salamanders are kept in a light- and temperature-controlled space and are used to examine how factors like chemical and light exposure affect limb regeneration. The researchers use retinoic acid, which Monaghan discovered was a key to regeneration when he was a postdoctoral student at the University of Florida. When retinoic acid is added to a severed part of the salamander’s body, it causes the limb to regrow from the beginning.

To observe the regeneration process, the researchers use cloning to create probes which bind to a site on the salamander through fluorescent in situ hybridization, also known as FISH. The probes attach to antibodies on a specific mRNA protein, which is viewed under a fluorescence microscope.

To regrow their limbs, the salamanders undergo a series of steps not unlike the steps the human body goes through after an injury. No research team has determined exactly where the human healing process differs from the axolotl regeneration process—that is, what genes are switched on and off at what times.

That’s hardly surprising, considering the salamanders have an estimated 10 times as much DNA as humans do. Partly for that reason, the researchers are still some distance away from human limb regeneration.

Whether he’s slicing strands of DNA through gel electrophoresis or cleaning the salamanders’ tanks, Humphrey loves working in the lab. He will be on co-op next semester at Massachusetts General Hospital, studying the inherited disorder Mucolipidosis Type IV, but Humphrey hopes to stay involved if he can. According to Humphrey, becoming part of Monaghan’s team required a sending a number of “insanely persistent” emails and acclimating to a substantial learning curve, but he assured me the experience has been well worth it.

And my experience? Well, I’ve still got a ways to go before I understand all the steps of FISH, let alone how to integrate them into a set of interview questions. Nevertheless, I know a lot more about regenerative biology than I did two months ago.

Furthermore, after learning that my a-cappella singing, Tuesday-afternoon math tutoring friend is part of such an impactful project, I can’t help but wonder what other life-changing research the students I spend time with each week are involved in. It’s become clear in my first year here that Northeastern is a hub for scientific research and discussion, and I’m excited to become a more integral part of it all.

]]>0Angela Herringhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?page_id=13http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?p=46482014-05-23T16:58:42Z2014-05-22T20:50:57ZThis is a guest blog post by Eileen Sheehan, a biochemistry student at Northeastern University who is on co-op at Palmer Station, Antarctica. She will providing a series of guest blog posts about her co-op experience.

This is the story of my first Antarctic fishing adventure, in which we collected fish for all of our planned research experiments. It was a long and grueling night, but worth every minute of lost sleep.

The Laurence

The Laurence M. Gould research vessel is a vibrantly red 70-meter ship equipped with labs and used by the National Science Foundation for research in the Southern Ocean. We set out on a Saturday for Dallmann bay, where we went pot fishing for our red-blooded species, N. coriiceps and G. gibberifrons.

Neumayer Channel from the LMG. Photo courtesy of Eileen Sheehan.

To get there, we passed through a beautiful area called the Neumayer Channel. It’s surrounded by picturesque white mountains, icebergs, and the occasional sea animal. As we neared Dallmann Bay, I actually got to see a large ice float with about 12 fur seals lounging in the sun.

We began dropping our (extremely large, bulky) pots around 2 p.m. Luckily we had a lot of assistance from the marine techs on board. They tied up a string of four pots and pushed each one individually overboard.

While the pots sat at the bottom of the bay, we headed over to Low Island, where we trawled the ocean floor for icefish, such as C. aceratus. The net first went into the water at 10 p.m. but didn’t reach the bottom for another fifteen minutes. We then trawled along the sea floor for twenty minutes, and it took another fifteen or so for the net to reach the deck. Early on in the night when all four cups of coffee were fresh in my system, the wait time didn’t seem too bad. But as we approached 4a.m., the night began dragging on. At least we had our midnight rations of hamburgers and Twix bars to give us a bit more energy for the night ahead.

As we waited for our nets to reach the water’s surface, we suited up in our lovely Gorton’s fisherman gear. For me, this included many layers of warm, waterproof clothing beneath a bright yellow rubber suit. Rubber gloves and rubber steal-toed boots also helped to keep us dry. We top it all off with a hard hat—the last thing that we would need while fishing is to have to deal with a concussed team member.

Once we got the net back on deck, the fun really began. We all ran to open it, spilling a huge amount of fish, sea stars, algae, skates, small octopuses, you name it, onto the ship. We dug through it all looking for the fish species we wanted. Once we found our different icefish and the occasional red-blooded species, we placed them in large foam buckets that we’d set up earlier.

Once we were done digging, the marine techs helped us clean up the remaining debris with our hands and, if you were lucky, a shovel. The other animals just got tossed overboard back to their homes. Then, we moved the fish in their temporary buckets to the larger tanks on board.

We tried our best to keep the number of fish in each tank low. Our icefish tend to be extremely sensitive creatures, so it’s important that we ensure that we don’t over-pack the tanks with animals. We wouldn’t want them to stress as that can lead to illnesses and even death. The goal is to keep them alive so that way we can bring them back to the station and begin our experiments.

After everything was cleaned up, the net went back into the water to trawl again…and again and again for a total of 13 trawls yielding nearly 80 individual fish.

The next day we headed back to Dallmann Bay to pick up the pots, which the marine techs collected with giant machines. When the pots finally emerged, we had to move quickly. We carried each one to the center of the deck to open it and remove our fish and bait bags. Our fish were placed in tanks along with those from the trawls.

By the time we finished removing all of the pots from the water, we had a few dozen fish. Between this trip and a few after it, we’ve collected more than fifty N. coriiceps and 99 G. gibberifrons as well. Needless to say, we have plenty of our favorite red-blooded fish on hand now to begin experiments.

Once this 24-hour fishing bonanza was complete, we steamed our way back to Palmer Station. When we reached the station, we were able to start the process of moving the fish into the station aquarium. But that’s a whole other process and adventure that I’ll share with you next week.
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0Angela Herringhttp://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?page_id=13http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/?p=46392014-05-14T13:20:13Z2014-05-14T12:00:14ZI’m currently sitting at my standing desk as I write this after walking back from an interview on campus. I’m glad that I walked there–I could have just done it over the phone. But after meeting Wilfred Hsie, a fourth-year student in Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science, I wonder if I shouldn’t have danced my way over instead, if I shouldn’t be doing more than just sitting and standing at my convertible workstation. Maybe I should be spinning, squatting, and “sprinking” too. After all, Hsie said, there’s more than one way to interact with the infrastructures we’re used to.

A chair for example, elicits a typical response when we see it: sit down, butt on seat, back on back, feet on floor. But who’s to say I couldn’t “sit” with my head on the seat instead? Or, less dramatically, squat on it with my feet on the seat? Or butt on seat and one leg over head?

All these positions probably sound ridiculous, but why? Why don’t we approach our environment with more flexibility and freedom? And more importantly, why has movement turned into an isolated activity reserved for gyms and dance studios?

These are the kinds of questions Hsie asks in a short film he made for his Environment and Technology class with assistant professor Sara Wylie. “She asked us to look at some infrastructure and propose an alternative for how it could be used,” Hsie said. “That sent me off on a journey to understand what I do.”

You see, Hsie doesn’t always sit with his butt on the seat the way most of us do. As a kid in elementary school, he was always fidgeting, rubbing up against the cultural norm and getting in trouble for it. Over time he found other outlets for this energy–dancing, gymnastics, music. But then in Wylie’s class he realized that perhaps he didn’t need to stifle his desire to squat in a chair, or to dance-walk across campus, or to do a back flip off a concrete wall after running up its height, for instance. Through his work in Wylie’s class, he began to realize that perhaps the butt-on-seat paradigm is a learned habit, one that’s reinforced over and over by social and cultural norms, and that perhaps there’s actually value in pushing its boundaries. Perhaps it’s actually good for our bodies to move in more dynamic ways than the ones they’re used to.

“So there’s a way that society expects us to use a chair, and then there’s a way that when you start creating your own definitions you start to say ‘what way can I use this chair that gives me the most creative satisfaction?'”

Creative satisfaction and internal peace were two things that came up repeatedly in our conversation. Our workaday lives keep our butts in seats in front of computers on desks behind cubicle walls. Hsie thinks that patterns like this make it harder for us to remember our bodies, to be able to recognize when they need to stretch or run or jump. He recommended every now and then just taking a deep breath and tuning into the internal body, asking it what would feel right in this moment. If a squat feels right, then so be it. Who cares if the people around you give you funny looks? Maybe you’ll just inspire them to go home and do the same thing.

While I’m probably not going to start sprinking at my standing desk any time soon, the idea of interacting with my environment in more ways than those that are traditionally expected has been intriguing me ever since I watched Hsie skateboard off into afternoon sun last week. I probably won’t start dance walking to my on-campus interviews, but I may just squat on my chair this afternoon, just to see how it feels.